Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)

This is a rebooted series miles above the original run of flicks that ruled cinemas 40 year back. A rare, dark, thinking person’s treat in the middle of summer, more interested in sparking hot debate and making audience squirm than serving up empty CGI fireworks. Seriously, put aside the Oscar-worthy 3-D motion capture effects –- all shot in forest and a city, not a sound stage –- and watch this story. “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” picks up 10 years after 2011’s “Rise,” dumping its human cast (James Franco, bye) as we follow the primate survivors (Andy Serkis, you are a god) post bloody revolt and mass pandemic. This is the last encounter of ape and struggling humans –- led by an uncorked panicking Gary Oldman -- as the latter delve into the apes’ forest, to restart an electric dam. Any chance of interspecies peace is crushed under lingering wounds of the “old” world, and we enter a dark, new dystopian future the previous films merely hinted at. Director Matt Reeves has created a razor sharp sequel that, yes, may be inevitable, but it can still shock, too -- check an onscreen murder of a youth. Serkis is flat out amazing. A-

House of Wax (1953) and House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Vincent Price, with his abyss of a voice and those dead-stare eyes that play like daggers, remains the King of Horror Movies in my book. He has no successor. Two of his earliest flicks are “House of Wax” and “House on Haunted Hill,” with Price as an oddball NYC artist driven to sinister deeds after his wax museum is torched and he builds anew with a shocking sicko canvas, and then as a rich mystery host to a party at a haunted California mansion that promises $10,000 to any guest who survives a creepy lock-in. “Wax” -– itself a remake remade many times -– is classic with its ghoulish madman taking bodies, alive and not, and how the camera just sits on wax faces as they melt in fire. The then-new 3-D gimmicks may once have dazzled but now only seem silly, but never mind that. Imagine 1950s kids screaming horror at this nasty fun tale. “House” is too wink-wink meta, from its dumb opening to the nudge-nudge fourth-wall-busting asides. Sure it has several scares, and Price struts around deflating every other man within range, but even for corn, it’s all quite lame and forgetful. Not “Wax.” Wax: A- House: B-

Gravity (2013)

“Gravity” is exhilarating, the most damn entertaining, breathless film this year. The promos promise an outer space-set drama about two astronauts (Sandra Bullock and George Clooney) caught adrift in space after a freak debris incident, their shuttle destroyed and crew members dead. It is that and a survivalist-horror film drenched in the gut-punch notion that surviving in space means having to continue to face life’s cruelties on Earth. The lean plot is near required as director Alfonso Cuaron (“Children of Men”) plunges us into a 90-minute shocker that could break with too much filler. Among his sharpest onscreen moves: Simultaneously pitching “Gravity” as a near-wordless silent film of old, but shining new and large with spectacular, game-changing CGI, cinematography, and sound. He casts us adrift above the Earth, awed with wonder at our home and shocked by the absolute black void of space, and then miraculously takes us inside our hero’s space helmet with not a single edit. Bullock rips into her role -– raw, wounded, and shell-shocked –- deserves every award coming her way. As does Cuaron and co-writer/son Jonas who spin a perfect final scene uplifting in every sense of the word as it literally inverts the title. A+

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

I watched “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” twice in one week to truly understand how much of an empty-headed, empty-hearted letdown it is, a dull gray shadow of its first outing, “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” one of the most fun Big Hollywood Tent Pole Movies of 2003 and the past decade.

That was a deserved Hollywood blockbuster: The thrill of seeing undead men walking on the ocean floor in moonlight to take a ship, Geoffrey Rush’s gleefully nasty villain who, I swear, I wanted to win because he was so … rotten good, Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, a swashbuckling conman hero with eye-liner who took part in the action yet remained aloof, a comedic Puck-like character from Shakespeare. With an undying thirst for rum, rum, rum. And rum. It was as if Depp said, “You want me to headline a Hollywood summer film? Alright, stand back.” The cast and characters (including Orlando Bloom and then-unknown Keira Knightley as the hero and damsel in distress) seemingly had no idea how to contemplate the actor Depp or the character Jack, and in once hilarious scene Bloom all but breaks the fourth wall to make sport of Sparrow/Depp.

“Black Pearl” was and remains a fun blast. No one knew it would work. It did. Massively. (Rush was robbed of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, fact.) The film remains endlessly rewatchable, just to pick out the shifts and squirms in Depp and his pirate self. The inevitable sequels disappointed, they had nowhere to go but down, but they limped along nicely enough. This? This fourth sequel? Third sequel? Shit, does it matter? No. I have thus far avoided talking about it have you not noticed? It hurts my cinematic brain.

Depp is back, and the center stage as Jack Sparrow, the first mistake in this Rob Marshall-directed (he made “Chicago” and “Nine”) crapper that has no spark, no center, or soul, or logic. (Gore Verbinski helmed the first three.) Even hair-brained Hollywood logic, by which I mean the “Don’t think, enjoy” mantra is gone. Depp looks deeply sullen and uninterested from the start as he badly impersonates a London judge then – must I explain? – gets mixed in with a former flame (Penelope Cruz) and the nastiest pirate of all, Blackbeard (Ian McShane). It is McShane who gives some pulse to this mess, which leaves Bloom and Knightley behind for another couple two boring to speak about, and I say that knowing the dude plays a Christian missionary and the lady plays a genuine mermaid. How that can be boring, I’ll never know, but the writers behind this film make it so.

The whole darn lot is after the Fountain of Youth, and the climatic fight over it – involving pirates, Brits, the Spanish navy, those mermaids and zombies, yes, zombies – plays like an AARP promo. Arthritic, with bad-lighting, and lots of mugging. I mean sorry-ass smiles, not robbery, unless one counts the price of a movie ticket or DVD. The filmmakers whip up so many switcheroos that the endless double crosses become redundant echoes of “Gotch’ya!” In one ugly spot, Sparrow pulls a mutiny prank that gets an innocent man executed (by flamethrower!) at the hands of Blackbeard. Sparrow just shrugs it off. The scene is all kinds of wrong, bad for Jack and the series.

No scene is more boring and overlong than an early sword fight between Depp and Cruz, shot in pitch dark and from angles so unpleasant and haphazard, even a child would know we are watching stunt doubles piss about in a second-unit action scene. The once-rousing “Pirates” music by Klaus Badelt, Depp’s comedic timing, and the way he once slipped in and out of the action like an armed drunken court jester, is all off, as is the supernatural kitsch. We get zombie pirates, massive ships (the Black Pearl!) shrunken and captured in rum bottles, and voodoo magic. None of it is explained, and all of it reeks like half-assed script ideas abandoned whilst cameras rolled.

Rush returns (again!) as Barbossa, but that joyously evil glimmer he showed in “Black Pearl” is gone. Rush is here for the paycheck and the vacation in Central America, same as Depp. Having seen Depp slump through “Rum Diary,” I’m not too shocked, but Rush is usually above that. The first film played like a wild card gag, while “Stranger” lacks strangeness and magic, it is a lifeless bore, so dark (and in useless 3-D) I thought the big-screen TV we recently purchased was off kilter.

A fifth (!) “Pirates” is in the works, but I hope it’s a chest never opened. Beyond McShane and employing hundreds of CGI geeks and model makers, this third sequel (that hurts typing that again) has no reason to exist other than to have made hordes of money. (Which it sadly did.) Jump the shark? Jump off the plank. Captain Jack should quit the sea, and retire. To the ocean floor. Black Pearl: A On Stranger Tides: C-